Fans
of old TV series may remember a classic “Twilight Zone” episode titled
“It’s a Good Life.” It featured a small town terrorized by a 6-year-old
who for some reason had monstrous superpowers, coupled with complete
emotional immaturity. Everyone lived in constant fear, made worse by the
need to pretend that everything was fine. After all, any hint of
discontent could bring terrible retribution.
And
now you know what it must be like working in the Trump administration.
Actually, it feels a bit like that just living in Trump’s America.
What
set me off on this chain of association? The answer may surprise you;
it was the tax “plan” the administration released on Wednesday.
The reason I use scare quotes here is that the single-page document
the White House circulated this week bore no resemblance to what people
normally mean when they talk about a tax plan. True, a few tax rates
were mentioned — but nothing was said about the income thresholds at
which these rates apply.
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Meanwhile,
the document said something about eliminating tax breaks, but didn’t
say which. For example, would the tax exemption for 401(k) retirement
accounts be preserved? The answer, according to the White House, was
yes, or maybe no, or then again yes, depending on whom you asked and
when you asked.
So
if you were looking for a document that you could use to estimate, even
roughly, how much a given individual would end up paying, sorry.
It’s
clear the White House is proposing huge tax breaks for corporations and
the wealthy, with the breaks especially big for people who can bypass
regular personal taxes by channeling their income into tax-privileged
businesses — people, for example, named Donald Trump. So Trump plans to
blow up the deficit bigly, largely to his own personal benefit; but
that’s about all we know.
So
why would the White House release such an embarrassing document? Why
would the Treasury Department go along with this clown show?
Unfortunately,
we know the answer. Every report from inside the White House conveys
the impression that Trump is like a temperamental child, bored by
details and easily frustrated when things don’t go his way; being an
effective staffer seems to involve finding ways to make him feel good
and take his mind off news that he feels makes him look bad.
If
he says he wants something, no matter how ridiculous, you say, “Yes,
Mr. President!”; at most, you try to minimize the damage.
Right
now, by all accounts, the child-man in chief is in a snit over the
prospect of news stories that review his first 100 days and conclude
that he hasn’t achieved much if anything (because he hasn’t). So last
week he announced the imminent release of something he could call a tax
plan.
According to The Times,
this left Treasury staff — who were nowhere near having a plan ready to
go — “speechless.” But nobody dared tell him it couldn’t be done.
Instead, they released … something, with nobody sure what it means.
And the absence of a real tax plan isn’t the only thing the inner circle apparently doesn’t dare tell him.
Obviously,
nobody has yet dared to tell Trump that he did something both ludicrous
and vile by accusing President Barack Obama of wiretapping his
campaign; instead, administration officials spent weeks trying to come
up with something, anything, that would lend substance to the charge.
Or
consider health care. The attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare
failed ignominiously, for very good reasons: After all that huffing and
puffing, Republicans couldn’t come up with a better idea. On the
contrary, all their proposals would lead to mass loss of coverage and
soaring costs for the most vulnerable.
Clearly,
Trump and company should just let it go and move on to something else.
But that would require a certain level of maturity — which is a quality
nowhere to be found in this White House. So they just keep at it, with
proposals everyone I know calls zombie Trumpcare 2.0, 3.0, and so on.
And
I don’t even want to think about foreign policy. On the domestic front,
soothing the president’s fragile ego with forceful-sounding but
incoherent proclamations can do only so much damage; on the
international front it’s a good way to stumble into a diplomatic crisis,
or even a war.
In
any case, I’d like to make a plea to my colleagues in the news media:
Don’t pretend that this is normal. Let’s not act as if that thing
released on Wednesday, whatever it was, was something like, say, the
2001 Bush tax cut; I strongly disapproved of that cut, but at least it
was comprehensible. Let’s not pretend that we’re having a real
discussion of, say, the growth effects of changes in business tax rates.
No,
what we’re looking at here isn’t policy; it’s pieces of paper whose
goal is to soothe the big man’s temper tantrums. Unfortunately, we may
all pay the price of his therapy.
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